"'Get all you can, and keep all you get.' Did you never hear that before, mistress? if you have not heard it, you have practised it, I warrant me. But where's your buttery-hatch? I am spent with hunger, and 'specially with thirst." While Dickon, the Lancashire ploughman, was restoring the strength, which did not seem to be much impaired, the countess was absorbed in the long-wished for epistle. The letter was sad, almost hopeless; but it was from himself, and she gazed with delight on every line traced by that loved hand. The first impulse was that of joy; it was not till upon consideration and reflection, that she found in it matter for deep sorrow and despondency. It ran thus. CHAPTER XIII. Nor can any men's malice be gratified further by my letters, than to see my constancy to my wife, the laws, and religion. Bees will gather honey where spiders suck poison.--_Eikon Basiliké._ "Dearest Wife, "You will have heard from other hands the ill success of our expedition. My Winifred, who knows what have been my fears from the beginning of this undertaking, also knows that my mind has been prepared for the result, and will therefore be aware that among all his sorrows her husband has not had to endure those of disappointed hope. Let her then be assured that his heart, though grieved, is unsubdued; and that his soul is fully made up to meet with constancy whatever may occur to himself. "As my dear wife may well believe, I have suffered much. I have seen counsels which appeared to me the most imprudent, and which the event has proved to be such, invariably prevail. I have seen every opportunity of success neglected. I have seen, without the power of preventing it, rashness, where prudence should have ruled; deliberation, where boldness and decision would have been true discretion. "But, as my Winifred knows, it was not with the expectation of ultimate success that I devoted myself to the cause of my king. I obeyed what I believed to be the call of duty, but I may have been mistaken. When I have seen the blood of my countrymen stain their native soil, then indeed I have felt doubts, agonizing doubts, as to the correctness of my judgment. I have looked on death before; I have served in Germany; I have been an eye-witness of assassinations in Italy; I have seen criminals pay the forfeit of their lives; but, in the solitude of a prison, it is the image of the first victim of civil strife that haunts my imagination,--that moment, when I saw one of our own Scots fell with his battle-axe a fellow Scot; when I heard one foeman utter a threat, the other a cry for mercy, in the selfsame tongue! I still see the dying glance of that blue-eyed youth, the life-blood staining his fair crisped curls: in the heat of battle the impression was momentary; but now, in darkness and in silence, that image rises up between me and sleep!